Why you need to understand anticipatory anxiety

Anticipatory Anxiety is where you get a stress response when there is nothing in your immediate environment that can cause you harm. Or put another way, the sensations and worry that you feel have evolved to protect you from real danger, but because you have the capacity for thought, they can arise due to the fact that you can think!

I think it is necessary for you to understand anticipatory anxiety if you have anxiety, social anxiety, panic attacks, health anxiety or stress, as this is something that you can not only control, but change.

I am going to talk to you about

Fear and Anxiety

and then I shall give some examples in relation to

anxiety and stress

panic attacks

health anxiety

social anxiety

Understanding the difference between fear and anxiety.

I’ve spoken about this before, but I shall give a quick recap here.

Fear is what you feel when you are in immediate danger, such as suddenly being confronted by a bear!

Anxiety is what you feel when there is no bear (no real danger.) You are responding to an anticipated threat, that may or may not occur in the future.

When you feel fear (when you see the bear) the feelings you get are a result of the stress response – fight or flight. Once the threat has passed (the bear goes away), you calm down as you are no longer in danger.

When you are lying awake at 4 in the morning going over your favourite worries, this is where you can experience anxiety. Your threat is no longer tangible (such as a bear) your stress response is getting activated due to the demands placed on you ( or the demands you place on yourself ), the worries you have in your head, negativity – these start to become your threats, and your brain can start to identify them as such.

There are different ways that you can experience anxiety, as opposed to fear, and I am talking to you about one of them now. In future posts I shall go over some more.

Anticipatory anxiety, and anxiety

Some examples that you might worry about (or anticipate) are

Am I good enough?

How can I get through tomorrow?

What if I don’t get enough sleep tonight?

What if I can’t pay my bills, my mortgage?

What if I loose my job?

What if I fail?

What if my boss sees that I haven’t done my job properly?

What if I mess up?

and the list goes on.

One thing you might notice is that none of these things are happening right now. If you are awake at 4am, lying in bed, they are really only occurring in your thought processes.

Hopefully you can see the difference in this example between fear and anxiety. Fear would mean something is really happening right now. I am not dismissing your worries, rather I am hoping to get you to think that at 4am you are probably lying in a nice comfortable bed, so your immediate environment is okay. The problem arises due to your thoughts.

Anticipatory anxiety and panic attacks

If you have panic attacks you will know that they can occur out of the blue, with no real thought processes present, but in this article I am only going to talk to you about them in relation to anticipatory anxiety.

Some examples are

What if I have a panic attack when I am out, when shopping, driving, or in places that they have occurred before?

What if I make a fool of myself?

What if I end up in hospital again thinking I am dying (been there, bought the tee-shirt on that one!)

What if I can’t catch my breath next time?

Similar to the anxiety examples, these are all worries about something that may, or may not occur in the future

Anticipatory anxiety and social anxiety

They won’t remember who I am (something I personally struggled with for many years)

What will I talk about?

Planning out conversations so you have something to say

Hopefully you will see from all the examples, that they all have one major thing in common – they are all worries about something that may occur in the future, hence where the name comes from – anticipatory anxiety, as you anticipate that something bad may happen in the future.

Why does it happen?

In two words, repeated practice. Think of your worries as being the result of a repeated experience. The more often you have a particular type of thought, the more likely you are to have it in the future.

How to stop anticipatory anxiety?

There are two approaches that immediately come to my mind – CBT and Mindfulness.

CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) will help you to change the type of thoughts you have in your head and Mindfulness will help you to let them go.

Combining various approaches you can Retrain Your Brain® to unlearn anticipatory anxiety.

Retrain Your Brain® to Unlearn Anxiety

As well as having anxiety myself, I am the only psychologist that specialises solely in anxiety disorders

RETRAIN YOUR BRAIN®You don’t need to wait to see me, all my materials are available to use now, in my online self help courseFind out more